The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
In work environments with networked computers, printers are often geographically distributed in the environment. Further, computer users typically use many different software applications, and one user of one computer in the network cannot easily determine what applications are in use by another user of a second computer in the network.
In this environment, a first user may encounter difficulty distributing a particular electronic file or document to one or more other users. As a hypothetical example, assume that one user, Alice, desires to distribute an electronic slide presentation to Bob and Carol. Alice has prepared the presentation using a hypothetical client-based presentation software program called SuperSlide. Alice invites Bob and Carol to a meeting and wants Bob and Carol to view the presentation before the meeting or have a printed copy of the presentation available at the meeting. However, Alice does not know if Bob or Carol have SuperSlide on their computers, and SuperSlide is not a server-based program. If Alice sends the SuperSlide presentation to Bob and Carol as a file attachment to an e-mail message, Bob and Carol may be unable to view the presentation. Alice needs a way to provide a viewable or readable electronic document to Bob and Carol without knowing what software Bob and Carol have available.
Various portable document formats have been proposed to solve this problem, including Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif. However, PDF and similar formats all require receiving users such as Bob and Carol to have a document reader installed and available on their machine.
In operating systems such as MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP, a user can install on a client computer driver software for multiple printers, including networked printers. The user can instruct the operating system that one of the printers is a “default” printer. Print requests are directed to the default printer unless the user specifies a different printer at the time of printing, using a print dialog or other facility of the operating system and its applications.